From time to time, you may be linking to other sites that are unrelated to yours. Remember, every time you link to someone, you lose a bit of your “link juice”. Whenever a situation arises when you want to give your visitors a link, but not necessarily for SEO purposes, it pays to have the link be “NoFollow”.

Here is an example of a link with the nofollow attribute:  link

To learn more about how and when to use a NoFollow link, please review Video #19. Read the rest of this entry

An important part of having an effective navigation is having a sitemap. Unfortunately your blog will be constantly changing, and updating a sitemap sure would be a pain. Fortunately there are plugins that can create the sitemaps for you, and automatically modify them for you every time there is a change. I suggest using the google sitemap plugin.

Once the plugin is installed, just head to “Settings” and then click on the “XML – Sitemap” option. Here you will see a few options for the sitemap. Once you are satisfied with this (the default settings are fine) click to build it.  If you experience an error with the build (I did when I tried to create it), you will need to create two files and upload them to the root of your blog directory.

The files you need to create are “sitemap.xml” and “sitemap.xml.gz”. Make sure they are writable. Once you have done this, you should be able to create the sitemap. 

Watch the process in video #20 below: Read the rest of this entry

Sometimes I move posts around on my blog, change categories, and so forth. This can cause a problem when this also changes the post’s URL location! This could mean that if someone was linking to a post, and I moved it, they would end up getting an error.

The redirection plugin takes care of this for you, and whenever you move a post, it creates a redirect for you. The plugin actually does a lot more, including setting up “groups” of redirects, monitoring errors and responding, and so forth.

It's well worth installing - watch the video below to see how it works: Read the rest of this entry

You will want to make sure that you do everything you can to encourage your visitors to interact with you. This can be done in a variety of ways. One thing that works for me is encouraging your readers to leave you comments.

Once they do, make sure that you take the time to respond to them! Whenever a visitor leaves their web address, I would also suggest taking the time to visit their blog and leave a comment. Remember, a very small amount of people actually take the time to leave you a comment. Make sure you take the time to interact with them!

To see a bit more about this, please view video #22. Read the rest of this entry